June 28, 2011

It doesn’t matter if you work in television, radio, advertising, communications, marketing, digital or mobile; your top job is developing audience. You can use words like influence and connection, conversation and relationship but having more people consume your offering gives you a better chance on driving success through whatever metric you decide to employ.

Return on your investment may be measured by revenue or awareness but unless you are independently wealthy, you need to eventually realize results of some kind. So in the quest for advancement, most are hesitant to take chances and things get stuck.

Creating Your Experience

As you know, the word media is plural for medium yet there is plenty of evidence that some feel it is a catch-all phrase. But for the most part we consume media alone through gadgets and channels. And with technological advancements, our experience is more in our individual control every day. Our user experience can be uniquely ours.

You don’t read your Facebook newsfeed with ten other people. You aren’t sending tweets from the control room of a studio. And you are probably not devising your next blog post while mapping out storylines and an editorial calendar with your team. Creating and consumer media is a personal process. There are exceptions but we mostly read, watch, listen, write and interact alone. Our quest to reach and share with others makes the experience social.

Imagine. Create. Share.

Think about your average week. Mine consists of time online, calls, email, writing, maybe a webinar, group calls, business development, client work, proposals, team discussions, driving to appointments and research. Your week may be different but you are conducting most of that work alone through various media.

So when companies talk about gaining more market share or building a brand - which can only be done between customers - they often use averages and demographics, charts and trends and that is valuable information but more times than not our clientele consume our offering alone.